School Ties

In the early nineteenth century, as alumni associations quickly became commonplace, Oxford and Cambridge colleges established their own alumni magazines and societies. This raises questions such as: what kinds of friendships were created at medieval universities? How commonly did university men retain lasting connections with those they had met years ago as scolares? The answers to these questions tell us something about the medieval universities as institutions capable of forging new social identities for their members. This chapter reviews the available evidence for friendships among old members of medieval Oxford and Cambridge. Nearly all of the evidence discussed comes from previously published sources, including institutional records and official correspondence, letters from formularies and at least one real-life example of how such formulas might be employed, the theories of friendship taught in the classroom and those theories as embodied in popular handbooks for students, and the evidence of wills.